The Goodman
by SunnyBunny99
Summary: A slightly abridged, in-depth first-person glimpse at one of my favorite parts of the novel. Montparnasse is a hardened thief, but will a run-in with an seasoned ex-thief with a different mindset work to change his? A completed oneshot. Please read and REVIEW!


**So I was skimming through Les Mis, and I found a section which I really liked. Of course, having not posted anything new in quite a while, I wanted to step up my game and make a oneshot out of it. Basically, Montparnasse tries to rob Jean Valjean, who, of course, promptly kicks his butt, gives him a two-page lecture on laziness, and then hands him his wallet and continues walking like nothing happened. I figured I'd switch the viewpoint from Gavroche's third-person to Montparnasse's first-person to spice it up and let my fingers and the keyboard do the rest. I directly transcribed some of JVJ's speech into this story—the beginning of it, anyway. I couldn't bring myself to type the whole thing…*chuckles* lazy, aren't I? He wouldn't like me much. But, without further ado, here it is. Enjoy and review!**

**Author's Note: My physical version of JVJ is Ramin Karimloo. And I also own nothing of Les Mis.**

For nineteen years I was a thief. From the day I learned to crawl I was pickpocketing; shoplifting came as casually as breathing. By the age of five I had a collection of hand kerchiefs, at seven I was the proud owner of exactly twenty-two gold pocket watches. By this trade it was that I paved my way into the ranks of the elite bourgeoisie and from there into Thernardier's closest circle.

But he is no matter to me now; let us discuss how this habit was halted.

My salvation came on a brisk October night and in the form of a goodman. I was loafing on a street corner, as was my ritual, chewing absentmindedly on the stem of a withered rose when I saw him coming. He was my prime type of prey—old, as his shaggy grey-streaked hair and slow pace suggested, and obviously unassuming. A wicked smile lifted the corners of my mouth; I pressed myself into the shadows and stared after him as he strolled by without so much as a glance in my direction.

When he was roughly twenty paces ahead I put the rose in my teeth and slunk out, hands already flexing in eager anticipation for the feel of that fat purse in their grasp. The night air was chill and heady; my increasingly shallow, rapid breath created thin billows of fog as I followed the goodman down the alleyway. Oh, what an utter fool he was, to be sure! He still gave no sign of knowledge to my encroaching presence; his pace was as steady and melancholy as before, with sloped shoulders hunched beneath a plain, patched coat.

As he walked into a pool of light created by a gas-lamp I felt that familiar rush, the trigger of adrenaline which signaled to me the moment of attack. And so I made it—tossing the rose aside I dashed forward, laying hands on the goodman's shoulders and wrenching him around as to bull him to the ground. But the second he faced me I knew that I had a terrible mistake. That stooped posture of hunched shoulders and slow walking had been a clever ruse; now he straightened up to his full height, a good two heads over my own, and pulled from my grip as easily as if I had been an annoying child tugging at his sleeve.

Nonetheless, for some strange reason, my wild instinct spurred me on. The desire for money overwhelmed my senses and so I tackled him. Usually when I assaulted old people they buckled beneath me with an audible sound of "Ooof!" as the wind was knocked from their slight frames. But not this goodman, no; he was as solid as a plow horse beneath that coat, and I found myself seized in a grip of iron, flipped around like a ragdoll and slammed to the damp cobblestones—now _I _was the one to go "Ooof!"

Desperately I tried to scramble to my feet again, but my victim—or, rather, my assailant—brought a heavy knee down on my chest, trapping me as firmly as a bug beneath a straight-pin. For a long moment we stayed like that, both of us breathing heavily from the exchange, before the crushing pressure of his knee abated.

I heard an unusually quiet voice in my ear: "Get up."

Red-faced and breathless I could not help but obey. He had my shirt-collar in his strong grip, and of course I initially tried to free myself, but all my writhing and thrashing around did naught but exhaust me. All the while this odd goodman held me fast, saying nothing but watching me with a serious face. Finally, seeing that I was finished, he shifted his steely hold to my wrists. We now came face-to-face; in our struggle his cap had been knocked off, revealing his low, bold brows and deep brown eyes. The latter held no emotion and were therefore all the more frightening in their intensity as he scrutinized me.

Again he spoke; again, his voice was steady and strangely quiet. "How old are you?"

I nearly laughed; I had just attempted to assault this man, and he wanted to know my age? Well, not that it would hurt much…not that the police would care. "Nineteen."

"You are strong and well. Why aren't you working?"

"It's tiring," I responded truthfully, with a smirk.

"What's your business?"

Here I sneered at him, putting all the derision I could into my voice: "Loafer."

The umber eyes narrowed slightly, and he gave me a bone-jarring shake. "Speak seriously," he growled. Then, with a lighter tone edged with compassion, "Can I do anything for you? What would you like to be?"

"A robber," I replied flatly, scornfully, giving another experimental twist to try my hand at freedom. His grasp held fast.

My captor paused and glanced away briefly to mull over this. Finally, he gave a short sigh and looked back at me. The fierce, stony look which had held his face before had melted into an expression of sorrow. His lack of anger was confusing, but I kept a vigilant sullen silence as he began to speak in a grave tone.

"My child, you are entering by laziness into the most laborious of existences. Ah! You declare yourself a loafer; prepare to labor. Have you seen a terrible machine called a rolling-mill? Beware of it, it is a cunning and ferocious thing; if you catch the skirt of your coat, you are drawn in entirely. This machine is idleness. Stop, while there is yet time, and save yourself!" He punctuated this with another shake. "Otherwise," he said sorrowfully, "it is all over; you will soon be beneath the wheels. Once caught hope for nothing more. To fatigue, idler, no more rest!"

After a brief pause, he chuckled and shook his head. "The implacable iron hand of labor has seized you." He held up a hand and squeezed it tight in a fist. "Earn a living, have a task, accomplish a duty, you do not wish it—to be like others is tiresome, hmm?" Another firm shake; I winced as my brain hit the walls of my skull. The goodman tut-tutted. "Well, you will be different. Labor is the law—he who spurns it as tiresome will have punishment. You are unwilling to be a working man? You will be a _slave." _He hissed the last word, his eyes flinty. "Labor releases you on one hand only to retake you with the other; if you are unwilling to be her friend, you will be her servant.

"Ah!" He shook a finger in my face. "You have refused the honest weariness of men; therefore you shall have the sweat of the damned." Here he pulled me close. I trembled, shaken by the depth of his words and the verve with which he whispered them, the raw, blazing light in his eyes as he stared me down. "While others sing, you will rave. You will see from afar, from below, other men at work; it will seem to you that they are at rest. The laborer, the reaper, the sailor, the blacksmith, will appear to you in the light like the blessed in paradise.

"What a radiance in the anvil! To drive the plough, to bind the sheaf, is happiness. The bark free before the wind, what a festival! You idler—dig, draw, roll, march! Drag your halter; you are a beast of burden in the train of hell!" He gave another sharp, disdainful "Ah!" and shook his head, setting his jaw resolutely before continuing."To do nothing, that is your aim," he said in a low tone. "Well!" Here he gave a dark chuckle, sending gooseflesh rippling up my arms.

And he continued to lecture me, holding me ever so tightly in that unrelenting grasp of his. His eyes bespoke withheld resentment, a deep-seated, smoldering anger—not necessarily at me, I felt, but at the trade which I represented to him—laziness. Feeling the hardened ridges of calluses on his large hands and the formidable strength of his grip I knew that he had experience in this matter, and by long years of toil had come to loathe idleness with a furious passion. He spoke with an almost pleading fervor, the flux of his tone waxing and waning from spat notes of bitter gall to low, hard words of hatred and then climbing up to lilting, sorrow-filled peaks of pity.

He had once been a wretched man, this fellow, I realized as I beheld him. He was not just an old fodderbag spouting half-brained laws and demands about following the rules; he spoke from past experience. And he was trying to warn me. This proof solidified itself in the last part of his speech—his grip on my wrists tightened even further into a crushing vice; I yelped in pain and gasped slightly as he leaned in closer, and as I watched the swirling depths of his brown eyes took on a scarlet tinge.

"Woe to him who would be a parasite!" he snarled fiercely, baring double rows of clean, strong white teeth. "He will be vermin. Ah, it is not pleasant for you to work? Ah, you will have but one thought—to eat and drink, and sleep in luxury." He shook his head once more, a small and mocking movement. "You will drink water, you will eat black bread, you will sleep upon a board with irons riveted to your limbs, the chill of which you will feel at night upon your flesh!" The hardness of his voice had morphed into a terrible monotone flatness, quiet even to the point of being calm. He whispered these words breathlessly, his lips moving rapidly with the urgency of a dying man.

"You will break those irons, you will flee. Very well. You will drag yourself on your belly in the bushes, and eat grass like the beasts of the forest. But you will be retaken." His voice dropped to a barely audible whisper, and in the light of the lamp I saw tears glittering in his gaze. "And then you will spend years in a dungeon, fastened to a wall, groping for a drink from your pitcher, gnawing a frightful loaf of darkness which the dogs would not touch, eating beans which the worms have eaten before you. You will be a woodlouse in a cellar." He jarred me again with a violent shaking and blinked rapidly, forestalling the tears which threatened to leak from the wrinkle-fringed corners of his eyes. "Oh!" he groaned, shaking his head dejectedly. "Take pity on yourself, miserable child, young thing, a suckling not twenty years ago, who doubtless has a mother still alive!" An edge of fervor leapt into the goodman's voice. "I conjure you, listen to me! You desire fine black clothes, shining pumps, to curl your hair, to put sweet-scented oil upon your locks, to please your women, to be handsome?"

Then he laughed, and it was the most terrible sound that has ever reached my ears—hollow and bitter, bearing the crushing weight of guilt and sorrow. He shook his head again and met my eyes with his own. They shone with a thick sheen of tears, and his lips trembled when next he spoke. "You will be close shorn, with a red coat and wooden shoes. You wish a ring on your finger? You will have an iron collar on your neck. And if you look at a woman, a blow of the club."

I shuddered; grief practically dripped from each word, and it burned like acid to the ears. The goodman's eyes lit up with urgency, and he shook me again. "You will go in there at twenty," he hissed; his breath blasted my face, hot and damp and heavy, "and you will come out at fifty! You will enter young, rosy, fresh, with your eyes bright and all your teeth white, and your beautiful youthful hair…" His voice cracked and he trailed off momentarily, but he swallowed and pressed on. "But you will come out broken, bent, wrinkled, toothless, horrible, with white hair! Oh!"

I felt his entire body sag at this last exclamation, as if the sorrow had snatched his strength. But he never released me, and within a moment he had recomposed himself. "My child, you are taking a mistaken road, laziness is giving you bad advice—the hardest of all labor is robbery." His thick brows knitted and furrowed and his mouth turned down at the edges; the raw, bleeding pain in the umber depths of his irises told me of the experiences behind the overwhelming emotion with which he poured out all this. "Trust me," he murmured in a voice like rusty thunder, "do not undertake this dreadful drudgery of being an idler. To become a rascal is not comfortable. It is not so hard to become an honest man."

Suddenly, unexpectedly, he released hold of me; I stumbled back, my hand slapping against the damp wall as I groped for support. Disbelievingly I squinted at the broad, looming form of the goodman who still stood there, outlined in the dim light. Was he not going to call for the police?

"Go now, and think of what I have said to you," rumbled the old man. "And now, what was it that you wanted of me? My purse? Here it is." Something flew through the air and I caught it, fingering the soft leather with numb, trembling fingers. Slowly looking back up at the stranger's shadowed face, I cautiously slipped it into the back pocket of my coat.

Without another word the black silhouette turned away from me and continued walking down the alley with the same methodical pace as before our encounter. Still in a state of minor shock I watched him melt into pools of shadow and then reappear under the gas-lights—this pattern repeated itself several times before he turned a corner and vanished from sight. My mind still scrabbling to pick up the pieces of my shattered and confounded thoughts, I began to walk on my own with hands buried deep in my coat pockets. The thunderous notes of the goodman's speech reverberated in my ears, and I could see the film of tears standing in those kind brown eyes. Grace was a thing I had never encountered before, but it pierced me to the very soul like the keen edge of a blade. Suddenly the rich velvet of my coat seemed unbearably heavy and hot and itchy. It had been bought with stolen money; money from the purse of an old man with grey hair, just as that goodman's….

Suddenly the realization of what I had been doing for the past nineteen years came crashing down upon me. I had been robbing innocents of their only hope for life, the only means by which they could afford to spare themselves from the merciless tax collectors and debtors' prison. How many people had ended up there on account of my meddling? My mother had died of the pneumonia—had she been robbed from? If she hadn't, would my father have been able to buy medicine for her? Would she have lived? I staggered slightly, gasping in great lungfuls of air, as tears streamed down my cheeks in hot rivulets.

I leaned heavily against a wall to dry my eyes and regain coherent thoughts. Once having had a good proper cry in the privacy of my own company, I resumed my solitary walk and mused over my resolve for a new life. I wished to hunt down that goodman again, and fall at his feet and beg for forgiveness and thank him profusely for his warnings and graciousness. But he was probably home by now, and the likelihood of ever chancing upon him again was slim to none. So, it seemed that taking his advice was the best way to amend it. I sighed, watched the dense cloud of fog jet from between my lips, closed my eyes, and walked on.


End file.
